It's just a guess, but it's worth looking at. It has a screenshot and a demo.

Tk::Table is slow, but I tried with 40 X 5 table, it seems "okay" to me.

I don't know what widget you used for each cell. Some widgets are lighter than others. As you said an alternative is to draw on Canvas, I assume your table is readonly, in this case, Label is good enough for your cells. You can use Button as row and column header. (Even if your cells are writable, most likely Entry is good enough.)

Below is the code I tried, it does take around 10 seconds to come up, but after that it responses to row or column scroll quite okay. (I think I should mention that my computer is 7 years old and really slow)

use Tk;
use Tk::Table;
use Data::Dumper;
use strict;

my $mw = MainWindow->new;
$mw->geometry("600x250");
my $table = $mw->Table(-rows => 40, -columns => 5, 
                       -scrollbars => "se",
                       -fixedrows => 1, -fixedcolumns => 1,
                       -takefocus => 1)->pack;
foreach my $col (1 .. 5) {
    my $col_header = $mw->Button(-text => "Column " . $col);
    $table->put(0, $col, $col_header);
}
foreach my $row (1 .. 40) {
    my $row_header = $mw->Button(-text => "Row " . $row);
    $table->put($row, 0, $row_header);
    foreach my $col (1 .. 5) {
        my $cell = $mw->Label(-width => 10, -text => $row * $col, -bor
+derwidth => 1, -relief => "solid");
        $table->put($row, $col, $cell);
    }
}


MainLoop;
[download]

I do have a thought triggered by your OP, to create something like Tk::TableLite. The biggest parts I want to improve are:

1. instead of having one widget for each cell, only have one widget for each cell in the viewport. By doing this, the weight of the GUI, is no longer related to the size of the data, and it is predetermined.
2. Scroll should not scroll widgets (cells), widgets are fixed. Scroll only scrolls a sliding window against the data, and the data in the sliding window will be used to reset the text displayed in cells.

It's not terribly slow, but it's slow. I use Labels as the widgets, so it should be faster, in theory... The most annoying part is turning it off - it takes 5 seconds to close the application (hmm... sending kill messages to 200+ windows).

Anyway, I implemented a table with a Canvas, it works nicely and is faster. I needed another Canvas for the headings though, as I wanted them to be un-scrollable.